


Stairwell: A Vignette

by adderpated



Category: The X-Files
Genre: M/M, Out of Character, Vignette
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2000-05-01
Updated: 2000-05-01
Packaged: 2017-10-19 22:33:33
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 657
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/205948
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/adderpated/pseuds/adderpated
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Mulder sulks over the complications caused by a awkward social misjudgement involving Skinner.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Stairwell: A Vignette

If Mulder had looked, he would have seen the heavy rain that poured passed his window through the night, a plane of it lit tungsten yellow by lamp light. He had stopped looking at anything but his ceiling a long time ago. Now, when he glanced through the glass, he could see a further layer of the still heavy rain making streaks against the cloud darkened purple of the light. Dawn was coming. It had been all night.

He realized he didn't mind, not at this moment. He had destroyed his life but at this point he didn't care. He had spent the whole night in emotional tumult, while his body lay still on the couch. He was calm now. He felt panic occasionally, not that he had made a wreck of his world, but that he didn't care. He took a kind of wild manic glee in it. He revealed, almost in the freedom of it, while the back of his mind was still screaming in pain.

If he had injured his present life beyond repair, if he had changed his life so suddenly and abruptly and with such little, so seemingly small actions – and he had no doubt that this was the truth – he knew only he was to blame.

His thoughts had been mostly for himself this night. It wasn't that he didn't see the the pain, the hurt, the suffering, the confusion that he had caused other people. He did see it. There were the people that he loved most, respected most, whose opinion he esteemed most. These were the people he would, quite literally, die for. These were people he did not want to ever live without, so better to die trying to save them. These were people who caused him to hope for death rather see himself shamed in their eyes. He couldn't help but see their pain. And that their pain, too, was his fault.

It was just that it belonged to a different order of mourning. It didn't belong to the first flush of suffering, that first panicked mental thrashing as realization set in, implication leading to implication. Mulder had thrown a stone into his own life, for a plunking sound, and was now witness the the wrinkles it made in his life, an ever expansive set of results, that moved his life from its core to distant, indistinct effects he could never calculate.

It was a different order of mourning. It belonged to later times. The rest of his life, in fact. It would be later, too, when he would replay the events that lead him here, encounters that took only minutes of his life recorded in his brain in infinite detail to be reviewed in ever agonizing detail again and gain and again, unable to stop the self-inflicted torment.

All this was there in his mind, waiting to be discovered and rediscovered. Waiting to be analyzed and dissected for each opportunity that would have allowed him a way out. But in the dawn, he still could not focus on them, those movies in his mind

He was calm now. I was too tired by grieving to grieve. That would wait for later. An endless cycle of tired calm alternating with solemn grief and sheer panic.

And all this he knew lay before him. He knew the endless process. It wasn't all that different then what came before. Before Scully. Before Skinner. Before real friendship. Before real companionship. Before real trust. Same old story. Just another added weight to the pile of bricks he carried on top of his head everyday, so familiar he had forgotten there was any different way to exist.

But Mulder was calm and tired now. He stared at the ceiling and listened to the rain. The low morning light and the rain was casting a patterns on the walls and the ceiling. It looked like his apartment was crying.

Eventually, he fell asleep.

**Author's Note:**

> I believe this is the first fan fiction I ever wrote to any sort of publishable completion point, although it was always intended to be a section in a longer work. It's juvenilia and I don't hold it in much regard. For one thing, I suspect this as being "out of character" to an X order of magnitude.
> 
> A revision, excised of the burden of excessive shame (which I never intended), is the starting point for a multi-chapter threesome story, which I may post as (even uncompleted) is much more sexy and fun.


End file.
